The disclosure relates generally to searching resources via an application, and more specifically, to searching resources via a web application in a user interface framework.
The vast amount of information being offered by web-based systems has increased and accelerated the demand for more sophisticated search techniques. Earlier search engines more or less catalogued systems that were maintained manually. Since the increasing number of sites manual maintenance quickly became infeasible and automatic cataloguers also arose. A breakthrough of web search engines came with the first full-text automatic crawlers that indexed websites fully automatically and that made them available to people searching for content by specifying search keywords. The results were simply based on a match between terms in the index and the specified search keywords. An important aspect was how to determine the order of relevance. Today, prominent and successful search engines facilitate algorithms to determine the order of relevancy. Simply spoken, the more pages pointing to a page, the more relevant the page is considered to be.
Even though market leaders are continuously improving their algorithms, the number of results being returned from search requests is becoming larger and larger as the information space continues to grow. End-users suffer as finding the best results becomes more difficult.
Faceted searches represent a promising technology for making information filtering more efficient. It enables users to filter millions of results along multiple criteria or dimensions and thus, to explore information spaces by applying multiple filters at once. Faceted searches usually rely on a display of multiple user interface (UI) controls that enable users to perform the multi-criteria filtering.
One document disclosing facet-based filtering is US 2012/0072432A1. It discloses a network update interface to a user on a network to display network updates from other users of a mutual social-networking site. The network updates shared by the other users are gathered in a stream and supplied to a facet-filtering system including a network update interface.
Document US2012/0173521A1 discloses methods for dynamically ordering facets for a search results presentation. Facets specific to a query are determined and facet orderings are dynamically generated.
Unfortunately, faceted searches only work well when the kind and characteristics of resources are well known—a prerequisite often not being fulfilled. Today, there is no reliable identification mechanism for identifying the kind of resource